A New Grey Zone in Global Trade Governance? Recent Developments on Food Security at the World Trade Organization (original) (raw)
This chapter examines recent developments by WTO member states to expand policy space for food security to demonstrate the appearance of a new grey zone in global trade governance. The chapter is organized as follow. The first section reviews developments in the WTO agricultural negotiations with respect to food security after 2007. The year 2007 is a critical temporal point during which the full extent of the global food price crises became known and was followed by a renewed interest in domestic and international food security policy by governments and international organizations. It will be shown that the manner of the uptake of food security at the WTO agricultural negotiations post-2007 was unpredictable and that WTO members are reshaping international trade rules to expand policy space for food security. This would suggests that the multilateral trade system is capable of more systemic-level flexibility than might have been expected given past debates about trade and food security. This exhibition of systemic-level flexibility is distinct from debates over the efficacy of new WTO rules for food security, which is increasingly subject to debate but beyond the scope of this chapter. The second section examines an unexpected source of innovative ideas that have informed the WTO agricultural negotiations on food security that can be traced to the United Nations human rights system. The flow of ideas from the UN human rights system to the multilateral trade system suggests that under certain global political economy circumstances the transfer of knowledge, norms, and ideas may be more likely than otherwise might be assumed by the literature on the governance of trade. This suggests that in addition to material changes in the global political economy the transfer of ideas may be an important factor in the successful the emergence of grey zones in governance and trade.
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